Studio711.com – Ben Martens

If you’re worried about Prism and the NSA, have you ever stopped to think about that device you’re carrying around in your pocket? The government doesn’t have to worry about tracking where you are because you’re doing it for them. At a minimum your cell phone is reporting which cell tower it’s connected to and sometimes it will report GPS location which is more exact. I’m fine with that, but I also feel that if info like this is being collected about me, I want to have the data! This stuff is cool!

This is where an app called Track My Life comes in. It’s available for Android, iPhone and Windows Phone and the basic app is free. It periodically records your GPS location and over time you get some interesting stats. How much time do you spend at work? At home? Somewhere else? How far have you travelled?

I don’t really know what I’ll do with the data yet, but as with most “big data” scenarios, the trick is to start collecting the data now so that when better analysis is available, you have the data to feed into it.

We’ve been doing quite a lot of grilling over the past year. While Tyla was pregnant, we were extra careful about making sure that the meat was cooked thoroughly. I got in the habit of using an instant read thermometer, but now that Elijah is here, I still find myself using it. Maybe it’s wimpy or geeky, but using that thermometer has saved me numerous times from either over or under cooking the meet. I use this Taylor thermometer and would recommend it. If you’re using Windows Phone, you can pick up a copy of GrillBuddy which will help you know the safe temperature for each type of meat. Don’t be afraid to geek out a little at the grill. You’ll know your dinner is safe and you’ll be able to pull it off at the perfect time!

Walking out the door in the morning and saying goodbye to my wife and son isn’t fun. I know Tyla does a lot more work during the day than I could handle, but I feel like I’m missing so much of Elijah’s life! Thankfully Tyla agreed when I brought up the idea of buying a web cam so I could peak in during the day to see my family.

I ordered the Foscam FI8910W from Amazon and so far I’ve been very impressed with it. It has pan/tilt controls from either a web browser or via your phone and it’s visible either inside or outside of your network. The picture is 640×480 and it does have a pretty good night vision mode. It also has two way audio so the remote viewer can listen in and talk into the room.

My only concern with it is security. It’s very easy to set up, but part of that easy setup creates a web page for your camera with a default password. It’s ridiculously easy to “hack” into people’s cameras with a Bing search and the default password. Obviously I have it locked down more than that, but I still wonder if I can do more. For now it’s sitting in my guest network so there’s no access to our other resources and has some longer non-default passwords. I’ll be looking at a few other options like a reverse proxy with SSL to really encrypt it.

But other than that, I give the camera two thumbs up!

It’s pretty common these days to hear that Android is taking over, but when I saw this chart [source], I was amazed at how far Android has come. In just three years, they’ve gone from 10% market share to ~80%.

I’m not sure what Apple has planned to combat this. So far they’ve been sticking to the original model that they debuted in the very first iPhone: a grid of icons on a tiny/thin phone. And where does Windows Phone or Blackberry fit into this? They’re also-rans, making up ~5% of the market.

Seeing outside of your bias is difficult, but I do firmly believe that for Windows Phone is the best phone OS for most of the population. I seriously doubt it will ever reach those kind of market numbers, but who knows. Defeating PlayStation seemed like an impossible task for the original XBox, but XBox is now at least splitting the market and has a huge following.

Tyla’s laptop died. It was some kind of hardware failure that we worked around for a while but eventually consumed the device, and I couldn’t resurrect it. It was time to shop for a new laptop.

We get employee deals with most of the major manufacturers through work, but I also included the Microsoft Store in our search. We don’t get any special discount there, but I’ve heard good things about them. Indeed the prices were excellent, they offered free shipping, and if we had picked a model that was in stock, we could have picked it up immediately. Unfortunately that wasn’t the case, but our new HP Pavilion TouchSmart arrived in just three days via UPS for $499. I was amazed that we could get a touch screen laptop for $500. I think the only change we might make to this in the future is swapping out the 5400rpm 750GB drive for either a hybrid drive or a straight SSD.

When the Microsoft Store sells a device, they put their extra special touch on it. When it boots for the first time, you aren’t flooded with a bunch of adware for AOL or McAfee. It’s a very clean machine with up to date drivers. I always format new machines when I get them, but I didn’t see any need* on this one.

If you’re looking for a new laptop, I recommend including the Microsoft Store in your search. You can’t customize the devices like you can buying direct, but you also get a machine that is very clean and ready to go straight out of the box.

* In the end I actually did have to reformat the laptop. The drive was partitioned with GPT instead of the older MBR scheme and my backup solution (Windows Home Server 2011) only supports MBR. There’s no way that I know of to revert from GPT to MBR without killing all the partitions and starting over.

Last week our printer, a Canon MX700 all-in-one,  stopped printing black ink. It was 7 years old and my attempts to revive it were unsuccessful. Printers are super cheap (they make their money on ink) so the cost of switching to a new printer is really just the cost of whatever ink you have laying around. There wasn’t much left in the printer and I didn’t have any spares to worry about so we ordered a new printer.

We stayed in the Canon family and got a Canon MX922. It provides similar scan, fax, copy, print functionality but it adds duplex printing and wifi networking. The wifi bit is really nice because it means the printer can be located anywhere in the house and can print regardless of whether or not a computer is also turned on. It has a bunch of interesting networking features built in like the ability to scan to an email attachment, print from an email sent to the printer (for easy printing from phones), and printing from popular online photo websites.

While we generally print photos down the street at the drug store, the printer does a remarkable job printing photos. It comes with some 4×6 photo paper and the results from the printer were tough to distinguish from the drug store prints. Consumer Reports says it costs $0.50 to print a 4×6 through the printer and our drug store only charges $0.29. But it’s still a nice feature to have available.

The only knock I have on it so far is that envelope printing is tedious. The 700 had a separate feed tray for envelopes. With the new 922, I have to remove all the paper, put in an envelope, and then switch back to the paper again. That’s not a huge deal for us though. If this printer lasts another seven years like the last one did then I’ll be happy!

When I built my latest PC, I specifically left out a graphics card. I generally don’t play graphically intense games on my computer and I wanted to see how the integrated HD 4000 graphics from Intel worked. That experiment worked well and most of the time I didn’t notice that there was no dedicated graphics card.

With the release of the latest Sim City and Cities in Motion 2, I decided it was time to get a real graphics card. $200 was my target budget so it pretty quickly came down to the GTX660 and the Radeon HD 7870. While the 7870 has slightly better performance, I opted for the NVidia card because I’m still boycotting ATI graphics cards after they screwed me over twice.

This GTX660 isn’t a top of the line card by any means, but it’s a nice fit for my system. I can crank the Sim City graphics settings up to the max at 1080p resolution and the card is still nice and quiet. So far it gets two thumbs up!

A week or so ago, we caught our first glimpse of the Xbox One which will be launching later this year. This was the first speech in a three part rollout and it focused mostly on the TV and entertainment options in the box. (Part 2 is E3 for games and then part 3 is Build where they’ll talk about developer stuff.) With all the talk about TV, the internet was once again buzzing about the possibility that the Xbox will be a DVR or that it will allow you to connect tuners to it.

I have no inside information, but there’s no way this is ever going to happen. First of all, those of us who are willing to connect to cable TV with anything but the box from the cable company is extremely small. On top of that, DVRs are a stopgap measure for a dying medium. Do you really think that in 10 years we’re really going to have to cache content locally? It’s ridiculously inefficient for cable companies to simultaneously pump 100s of channels to millions of individual consumers who then put that content back on hard drives to watch it later. Sooner or later (and we’re already making big strides in this direction) we’ll just pick the content we want to watch and it will appear on our TV. Netflix, Hulu, and Amazon are showing us what that might look like and the cable companies will either jump on board or they’ll die a slow death.

So with that future ahead of us, why would Microsoft, a company that also sells TV and movies digitally, want to invest any time in a solution that’s not going to be needed before the Xbox One hits the end of it’s lifecycle?

If you’re building a campfire to cook your food, there’s a lot of wasted energy. A company called BioLite has come up with an ingenious device that converts some of the heat from your campfire into power to recharge your cell phone or other small USB devices. It also uses that power to power a small fan that helps keep your fire burning strong. It’s only $130 or you can spend an extra $60 to get a grill attachment for it. There’s no fuel canister to carry around. You just stuff it full of twigs and leaves. The fan helps keep it burning hot so there isn’t a lot of smoke. What a great idea!

With our son coming any day now, I feel like we’re about to really ramp up our battery usage. For the past couple years, I’ve been investing in Eneloop rechargeable batteries. They hold a charge very well in storage and can be found at a decent price. I charge them with a La Crosse BC-700. It’s a wonderful little device that gives you detailed readouts about the state of your battery and provides a variety of charging speeds and options to get the most life out of your batteries.

I recently also picked up some spacers which lets me put AA batteries into a device that takes C and D batteries. They won’t last nearly as long as a full C or D cell, but those suckers are expensive so using a rechargeable is an attractive proposition. I suspect it will be a fine substitute in many cases. There are also bigger C and D rechargeables but I’ll need a new charger for those and I haven’t made the commitment there yet.

Based on current Amazon prices, a rechargeable AAA or AA battery is about 4 times more expensive than it’s alkaline counterparty. That means that I don’t generally use rechargeables in extremely low draw situations like clocks, but we use them everywhere else. And I suppose if you look at a big enough time span, even using them in clocks would pay off.

Is there anything you like better than Eneloops? Do you use C or D cell rechargeables?